The rustic vintage vibe of the Teskey Brothers will be the perfect accompaniment to this year’s Bello Winter Music Festival. Focus caught up with Josh Teskey about the process of nailing their latest album and their love of music …

Introduce yourselves to us; when did your love of music first begin?

We’ve always kind of done it our whole lives. I’ve always been interested in Blues and Soul music. I first started playing guitar and mucking around with harmonica when I was about 12 years old, so all throughout school. We’ve always dabbled in it; it’s always been there on the sideline. We got our first couple of gigs when we were around 16 in our area, and before that we were just busking.

And it was just your brother and you for quite some time before getting together with Liam and Brendan, now branching out and incorporating more members than ever before …

Well, I guess we still consider the main Teskey Brothers just the four of us, and then to add the horns and a few more members mainly because we are in a recording process; that’s how we have always recorded.

We got so into the sound on the album that through doing bigger shows, we have brought more members in just to mimic the sound of the recordings we have done.

Tell us about your record, Half Mile Harvest, released earlier this year. What was the creative process behind producing this album?

It was a lot of fun putting this together.My brother, Sam, takes a real interest in old analogue equipment, and he runs his own studio; we are lucky like that. We decided to do this whole album completely in analogue and tape – we have a big old tape machine from the late ‘70s in his studio there. We didn’t use any computers for this whole album! We tried to get it right the first time and enjoyed mucking around with all that old equipment.

Having recorded the album completely non-digitally, it really is reflected on the album with that old Bluesy vibe. Do you feel like you’ve nailed the sound you were going for?

Totally! All our influences and all the stuff I’m really into; all those old records have that sound … And with this analogue recording, we discovered there’s not really any other way to mimic it.

I was really blown away – especially with some of the vocal recordings, for me, achieving a natural breakup in the sound. With my vocals, once I was listening back, I felt like they had come from that era. So, I was really happy with the process.

What are you looking forward to about playing Bello Music Festival?

We really can’t wait to get up there. We’ve heard some fantastic things about the festival, with all the bands that are playing. There are some friends of ours, and we can’t wait to mingle in with the other artists and check out what this thing’s all about. Not to mention, it’s going to be getting pretty cold around that time, so hopefully, it’s a little bit warmer up north than down here in Victoria!

I’m going to be getting up and singing some songs with a whole bunch of other singers from around the festival, which sounds like an absolute blast.